Ursula Quotes

#1. Peace is not the absence of war - peace is the absence of fear.

Ursula Franklin

#2. Ultimately you write alone.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#3. An ex-wife is a woman with a crick in the neck from looking back over her shoulder at her matrimony.

Ursula Parrott

#4. The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#5. I could forget everything I'd lost, because I'd never had it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#6. Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#7. For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#8. Ignorant power is a bane!

Ursula K. Le Guin

#9. Crafty writers ... don't allow Exposition to form Lumps. They break up the information, grind it fine, and make it into bricks to build the story with.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#10. I hope you'll understand that I am not quoting those great words lightly. I do mean it. Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#11. Marriage is like war - an experience that no adventurous man would evade, and no sensible man repeat.

Ursula Parrott

#12. I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#13. There's this really good line in 'Women in Love' where Ursula says, 'I always thought it was a sin to be unhappy.' And actually I think that's very common, it's what a lot of people feel - that you have an obligation to life to be happy if you can.

Rachel Cusk

#14. But when we crave power over life - endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality - then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#15. I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence. By

Ursula K. Le Guin

#16. The trouble is, women have to be absolutely first class to get where third-class men get.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#17. Oh dear God, no, stop!"

Fumblefoot gave her a reproachful look. Stop what?

I have broken into an enchanted manor house and my pony has crapped on the floor. Oh God.

-Bryony and Roses by T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher

#18. The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#19. Anyhow they're always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#20. In innocence there is no strength against evil [ ... ] but there is strength in it for good.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#21. but he killed the best Disney villain of all time, the drag queen that is Ursula. Unforgivable. RIP. 4.

Tyler Oakley

#22. Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#23. What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#24. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#25. It's a queer business, making oneself blind.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#26. There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#27. Man's singularity is his divinity.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#28. It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#29. I am a former child, and I haven't forgotten a thing.

Ursula Nordstrom

#30. Where there's property, there's theft.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#31. A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#32. To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#33. Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing

Ursula K. Le Guin

#34. You can't change anything from the outside in. Standing apart, looking down, talking the overview, you see pattern. What's wrong, what's missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#35. There are times when you have to speak because silence is betrayal.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#36. It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.

Kate Atkinson

#37. All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#38. Do you know how to read?" "No. It is one of the black arts." He nodded. "But a useful one," he said.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#39. 'Banished men should never speak their native tongue; it comes bitter from their mouth. And this language suits a traitor better, I think; drips off one's teeth like sugar-syrup.'

Ursula K. Le Guin

#40. How you play is what you win.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#41. So we have this eyesore on the property.
No, it's not the beagle. I can understand why you'd think that, though.

Ursula Vernon

#42. And that's how Snuggles the hamster learned that yes, things COULD always get worse.

Ursula Vernon

#43. Oh Lavinia, Lavinia, you are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#44. I've been looking only at what's to be done next and forgetting why we're doing it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#45. If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#46. I hate the bigotry you believe in. But I'll try not to hate you."
"Why?" he asked. His voice was cold, as she remembered it.
"Hate eats the hater," she quoted from a familiar text of the Telling.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#47. He saw time turn back upon itself, a river flowing upward to the spring. He held the contemporaneity of two moments in his left and right hands; as he moved them apart he smiled to see the moments separate like dividing soap bubbles.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#48. Wold felt sorry for him, as he often did for young men, who have not seen how passion and plan over and over are wasted, how their lives and acts are wasted between desire and fear.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#49. But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead. In

Ursula K. Le Guin

#50. What I want is for people to really grab hold of language and not be nervous about it. 'The Word Spy' is all about diving in and playing with words.

Ursula Dubosarsky

#51. I tried to speak insipidly, yet everything I said seemed to take on a double meaning.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#52. To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#53. All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#54. My parents think the longer the name, the more powerful the sorcerer, so they named me Cassandra Morgan Ursula Margaret Scot. You can call me Cassie.

Christine Amsden

#55. Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#56. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#57. a book is a box of words until you open it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#58. [...]falcon-winged, falcon-mad, like an unfalling arrow, like an unforgotten thought.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#59. The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#60. Why hadn't she been a detective instead of a goddamn stupid third-class civil rights lawyer? She hated the law. It took an aggressive, assertive personality. She didn't have it. She had a sneaky, sly, shy, squamous personality. She had French diseases of the soul.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#61. She always brought something when she came on Fridays, and this time it had been a book. A Wizard of Earthsea, written by someone called Ursula K. Le Guin, and already after the first few pages I knew that this was an absolutely fantastic book.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#62. Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#63. Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same ... They can be neither separated, nor mixed.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#64. And so, because he won't let himself be hurt, he does wrong to those he loves best. And then he sees that, and after all, it hurts him.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#65. In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#66. Kids are pretty resilient. You don't have to be at every volleyball game. We can't guilt ourselves.

Ursula Burns

#67. You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?" "No - " "To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question." I

Ursula K. Le Guin

#68. Who do you think is lying to us?" Shevek demanded.
Placid, Bedap met his gaze. "Who, brother? Who but ourselves?

Ursula K. Le Guin

#69. I had ignored that black cellar and gone looking for the substance of Orgoreyn aboveground, in daylight. No wonder nothing had seemed real. I

Ursula K. Le Guin

#70. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#71. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#72. He was very weary; the day had been long, and full of dragons.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#73. Kids could and did swim in it happily as in their native element, at least until some teacher or professor told them they had to come out, dry off, and breathe modernism ever after.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#74. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#75. I hate the word sexy.

Ursula Andress

#76. The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#77. My dogs have barked at a beggar tonight and he proves a prince of starlight.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#78. I felt the pressure of people all around me, all the time. People around me, people with me, people pressing on me, pressing me to be one of them, one of the people.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#79. Up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society, and its rules, as he from his.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#80. What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#81. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#82. Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#83. But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#84. Laws are made against the impulse a people most fears in itself. Do not kill was the Shing's vaunted single Law. All else was permitted: which meant, perhaps, there was little else they really wanted to do ...

Ursula K. Le Guin

#85. To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#86. The artist who goes into himself most deeply -- and it is a painful journey -- is the artist who touches us most closely, speaks to us most clearly.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#87. In art, 'good enough' is not good enough.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#88. One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#89. In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#90. Scientific truth will out, you can't hide the sun under a stone.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#91. Let me howl and die.

Ursula Andkjaer Olsen

#92. The only problem is whether one adds life to one's years or years to one's life.

Ursula Parrott

#93. Talking about it changed it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#94. I couldn't live up to it. So I chose to run away.

Ursula Andress

#95. Manipulated, one manipulates others.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#96. Everything is old, here. We are old - the Masters."
"You're not," Irian said. She thought him between thirty and forty[ ... ]
"But I came far. Miles can be years.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#97. I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer,

Ursula K. Le Guin

#98. So many of his problems were of a kind that other people did not understand, that he got used to working them out for himself, in silence.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#99. I think ... you should have children, John." At least he's no longer talking about bugs.
"I'm too young, Dad."
"It's the most important thing ... I've done in ... my life.

Ursula Hegi

#100. To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

Ursula K. Le Guin